Engineering Graphene Flakes for Wearable Textile Sensors via Highly Scalable and Ultrafast Yarn Dyeing Technique

Afroj, Shaila; Karim, Nazmul; Wang, Zihao; Tan, Sirui; He, Pei; Holwill, Matthew; Ghazaryan, Davit; Fernando, Anura; Novoselov, Kostya S.

Abstract

© 2019 American Chemical Society. Multifunctional wearable e-textiles have been a focus of much attention due to their great potential for healthcare, sportswear, fitness, space, and military applications. Among them, electroconductive textile yarn shows great promise for use as next-generation flexible sensors without compromising the properties and comfort of usual textiles. However, the current manufacturing process of metal-based electroconductive textile yarn is expensive, unscalable, and environmentally unfriendly. Here we report a highly scalable and ultrafast production of graphene-based flexible, washable, and bendable wearable textile sensors. We engineer graphene flakes and their dispersions in order to select the best formulation for wearable textile application. We then use a high-speed yarn dyeing technique to dye (coat) textile yarn with graphene-based inks. Such graphene-based yarns are then integrated into a knitted structure as a flexible sensor and could send data wirelessly to a device via a self-powered RFID or a low-powered Bluetooth. The graphene textile sensor thus produced shows excellent temperature sensitivity, very good washability, and extremely high flexibility. Such a process could potentially be scaled up in a high-speed industrial setup to produce tonnes (∼1000 kg/h) of electroconductive textile yarns for next-generation wearable electronics applications.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 20, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 28, 2019
• Publication Date: Apr 23, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 8, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 9, 2019
• Journal: ACS Nano
• Print ISSN: 1936-0851
• Electronic ISSN: 1936-086X
• Publisher: American Chemical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 3847-3857
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.9b00319
• Keywords: General Engineering; General Physics and Astronomy; General Materials Science
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/4789669